Notes
"Speech is irreversible: a word cannot be retracted, except precisely by saying that one retracts it. To cross out here is to add: if I want to erase what I just said, I cannot do it without showing the eraser itself (I must say: 'or rather...' 'I express myself badly...'); paradoxically, it is ephemeral speech which is indelible, not monumental writing."[1]
The pull at the muscles, my thumb wrenched out in a split second from the palm lump, torn into juddery ribbons. A trace of heat down the inside length of each finger, a rough quality too, mud in its smallest, purest form, a dust of mites, stuck on strange sides of the skin print textures, a red colouration beginning to appear at certain segments on the thumb mound, at the crux of the wrist. A slight cut at the pinion of the first finger of the right hand. A weariness across both that makes them curl up into foetal balls, the recovery position, claws and praying fold. The veins are showing slightly green through the skin. My hands hum, they are lumps of sound.
The bike was noble at the start, leant elegantly against the wall. And then it started and I charted it all, I got it, captured and held for posterity, for the prosecution. This back alley, quiet spot, the scenic scene. The metal would give in some areas and not in others; it would dent then bubble, the green paint like the thinnest of layers, gold leaf on tubing, crinkled as the spokes chimed, kinked, popped; the tyres wobbled like fat-heavy skin, the rusted chain took its time to work away from the grip of the crank, its teeth and its curvaceous links meeting with beautiful ease… the brake lines swept themselves along, everything has a name, everything has its place, the wheel rims leaned out like someone not committed to an argument, the two echoing each others pain and motion, the clanging rips of the hammered energy. Crossbar lines sagged in the centre, quick blows, a bone shattering, a bruise not bothering to appear, the destruction ahead of itself. An earthquake on top of it. Thrown against the floor, tossed into the air, pulled at like a bread loaf, kicked and squeezed. The crank wheel slowly pressed over the hub like a melting record, pedals spun away from the force of blows with Toreador shifts, the hammer bull… the rust sowing out onto concrete, the bounce of the frame. The saddle cover lifted off like a milk carton rip, the spring system beneath now exposed like a rib-bone cage, and it was hit again and again, the springs bouncing out broken, a hoop at each end, hopeful, stupid, like the teeth of the machine, spat without blood onto the floor. Stamped, scratched and poked, the bike was turned upside down, inside out, on each end. The front forks splayed like a spatchcock, tearing welded ligaments, a soft wishbone, the wheel then held briefly on one rusted nut, desperate, helpless, it was plucked off, smashed across the space, rolling and pitching, a false freedom in the way it is swept away from the carnage. A demonstration of function and beauty. The tyres were pocked and crushed, the rubber brittle now, unable to recover as fast… the silver rims tortured in places, oil build ups, mud-caked, scratches and adjustment scars. The handlebars remained defiant throughout, their heavy duty stock metal, their white gloves, a slow-witted silence and stubbornness, the flaking cables trail from its brace garters, its defunct handles. The frame held for the most part, just the weaker links, the defensive frailties; a pincer movement, attack from all sides, airborne and assault, shock and awe. And what was the scene immediately afterwards, it was a special kind of silence, the heat through the body, the sweat beginning to gather at the base of the back. The creation of something different, energy conversions. That there is no point in here of all or nothing, of moving from A to B without transition.
The next day, the rain had fallen in the night, the whole miniature landscape had changed, the metal now river banks, rivulets, damming the weight of clear silver, the paint bobbing, leaf dust everywhere, Calm aftermath. The removal of the cause of the action, you still get the tail end of the action and the whole of its result – the gaze transforms the act. Rather than focusing, as might be the case in a performance piece, on MY act, there is a concentration on THE act. Yet still the broken bike remained in exactly in the same shape, the same agonised configuration (especially interesting if you see how the form ends up, when you see all the processes that it went through to get there – watching and waiting for the saddle cover to get into that final resting place, how does it get moved into that place? The combinations of such movements, the cause and effect of everything – this is a big part of this) Looking over the broken metal, you cannot tell which is the original wear and tear and what is the applied violence (the rape, pillage, the mindless attack) – we don’t know anything. We are WORM FOOD. Skeleton finds, human remains. And there is, watching on the editing monitors, the spectre of surveillance again, the realisation that in the chrome fittings, the rims and clips, the shaft of the saddle, the handlebar horns, there is a subtle vision of movement, a glimpse of the attacker, his shadow moving across the scene too, like a deathly mist, but in the metal mirror there are winks and bulbs of light, tears welling and disappearing as if the cycle knew what was happening. Its too tragic the whole thing… it's difficult to bear. Surround-consciousness, chrome-plated awareness; everything off-frame, sotto voce, stage-left, -right, behind the camera, get to life’s B-Roll, where things intersect. The light flashes, we watch for the swinging movement, the differences, real and presented time - kick your TV's guts in. The loss of function is:
EVERYTHING
I watched the metal yawning into mangled mouths… suffering, changing it into a new machine, record players and tape loops, filling in the gaps, resetting to start again. & It suggests a microscopic quality - particles of energy, on an exchange between surfaces... the way in which the video is edited, the cuts splice the 'stream' so the violence is now the EDIT (coming as it does always slightly after the genuine, real violent act/contact... a retarded reaction; we don't actually witness that precision of things, but occasionally the delayed movement of the effect), not the 'act', this exchange, this FRAMING and DELIVERY of the violence. Editing out your role. Give us our RESULTANT POSITIONS. With the graffiti position. The nondescript wall, cradled with the concrete floor, a relentless aspect to these hard, unyielding surfaces - a rock and hard place - with the grid system brick work, getting all Muybridge and score-ready. Let us catalogue every increment of this procedure.
“Let us look at a piece of chalk. We close and open our eyes. We have two perceptions. We nonetheless say that we see the same chalk twice. Here we have contents separated in time; we even see, phenomologically, a separation or division in time. But there is no division as far as the object is concerned: it is the same. In the object there is duration, in the phenomenon alteration. Thus we can also sense, subjectively, a temporal succession where, objectively, we must confirm a coexistence.”[2]
And there are countless examples around the city of bicycles chained to railings, drainpipes, chained to themselves outside buildings, perhaps left for a long time, which have been absolutely destroyed, beaten to a pulp, the wheels sagging into the angle of wall and floor. Walk-by violence, the same thing often happens to abandoned cars - if sufficient time has elapsed, the violence begins. The destructive forces of memory – antibodies, attack the cancer.
Eye Attack Bike – character assassination, a retraction of love. Telekinesis – controlled from beyond the frame, shot as a series of ‘looks’, not stills (not at all!) but a kind of overseeing of the procedure, reviewing what has been done, the handiwork…the back-alley beating. Retinal traces, the three-second present moment. Approximation and loss of human reaction time (the deferred soundtrack) and the ‘reality of the situation’. It all breaks down into a finer NOW. And a past, and so on. So on.
“The intuition of the past cannot itself be a pictorialization. It is an original consciousness."
Acronym life; impossibility taken into a ‘possible’ event or act.
A B I A E T C K T I K
(I) take it back (I) attack bike
It’s an absurdity, adding another phrase in order to retrieve or subtract something; then the extended idea (also contained in the original – there is nothing in the base elements, the bare mechanics of what is being said [language / letters] that was not there before in some other form) – destroying something as a one-way process, irreversible. Smithson made of sand.
Sotto Voce – off screen, old time movies, slapstick – some kind of permanence, vanishing point (destination). An act, one “retrograde”, one “not”.
Perhaps interpreting the brick backdrop as some kind of key code, or some system of translating the action into another form. If, for example, you took one precise, particular and specific area of the bicycle itself, such as one handlebar end, or the left peddle, and then charted it procession through the varying stages of the violence, noting its position in regard to the GAZE (the static camera) against the background. Perhaps each brick could be assigned a tone, or the level of volume were to increase as the bricks went higher, etc. so that, if you took more than one point on the bike, you could build up a strange, incidental, piece of composed music, Cagean systems, throwing the dice at the I Ching, etc.
We’re missing hours through blinking.
The positioning of the graffiti – I didn’t write it – claiming of buildings, anarchic grandiose statement, the fact that I tried to cover the words over with chalk and then decided (or did I realise that it was useless to pretend that it wasn’t there, that it hadn’t happened?) to leave it as it was, semi-obscured, and therefore highlighted(!)
The positioning of the graffiti – I didn’t write it – claiming of buildings, anarchic grandiose statement, the fact that I tried to cover the words over with chalk and then decided (or did I realise that it was useless to pretend that it wasn’t there, that it hadn’t happened?) to leave it as it was, semi-obscured, and therefore highlighted(!)
Circularity of soundtrack, which is then gradually dissolving too, from that locked repetition, to point-to-point touches, breaking out from the cycle into linearity. Because where does this stop? Could go on forever…how far are you going to go with this, how committed are you? Strange also how it was difficult to retain any of the (relatively short and clear) rhythms in the memory… another way you couldn’t go back. A Geiger counter noise – destroying this bike in half-lives, Zeno’s paradox, the bike will always win. Self-destruction of destruction by others… getting into the habit, in this TV nation, getting the feel of a cumulative community, starting to predict this mindlessness… EXHAUSTING, WELL, YES. Trying to force it – but it will not come, live mixing, in/out of synch.
YEAH, NEWSPEAK YOUR WAY OUT OF THIS ONE – ALTERNATIVE TITLE: SHOCK AND AWE
“Where do we get the idea of the past? The being-present of an A in consciousness through the annexation of a new moment, even if we call that new moment the moment of the past, is incapable of explaining the transcending consciousness: A is past. It is not able to furnish the slightest representation of the fact that what I now have in consciousness as A with its new character is identical with something that is not in consciousness now but that did exist – what, then, are the moments of original association that are now being experienced? Are they perhaps times themselves? In that case, we confront the contradiction: all these moments are there now, enclosed within the same consciousness of an object; they are therefore instantaneous. And yet the succession of time excludes simultaneity… it remains unexplained how the consciousness of a past becomes constituted on the basis of such signs, or in what sense, in what way, and through which apprehensions, these experienced moments function differently from the moments of quality, and function in such a way that the consciousness that is supposed to be now comes to be related to a not-now."[3]
YEAH, NEWSPEAK YOUR WAY OUT OF THIS ONE – ALTERNATIVE TITLE: SHOCK AND AWE
“Where do we get the idea of the past? The being-present of an A in consciousness through the annexation of a new moment, even if we call that new moment the moment of the past, is incapable of explaining the transcending consciousness: A is past. It is not able to furnish the slightest representation of the fact that what I now have in consciousness as A with its new character is identical with something that is not in consciousness now but that did exist – what, then, are the moments of original association that are now being experienced? Are they perhaps times themselves? In that case, we confront the contradiction: all these moments are there now, enclosed within the same consciousness of an object; they are therefore instantaneous. And yet the succession of time excludes simultaneity… it remains unexplained how the consciousness of a past becomes constituted on the basis of such signs, or in what sense, in what way, and through which apprehensions, these experienced moments function differently from the moments of quality, and function in such a way that the consciousness that is supposed to be now comes to be related to a not-now."[3]
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[1] Barthes, R. (xxxx) 'Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers' in Image Music Text. London: Penguin, 190.
[2] Husserl, E. (xxxx) On the Phenomenology of the Experience of Internal Time, 1893-1917.
[3] Ibid., 19.
*
(Deterioration)
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